Eureka the Butcher may not be quite as magical and violent as you would be led to believe… but they’re still pretty fucking awesome. Eureka the Butcher is the latest project of Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez of Zechz Marquise and The Mars Volta. The project reflects the more funky and electronic side of Marcel’s aesthetic. The project has been in the works for a few years, however, their debut album, Music For Mothers, is just dropping this Tuesday, May 28th. “I’d been doing it for a few years, but I’d just been doing it when I wasn’t onstage, touring, playing live,” Marcel told me in a recent chat. He describes the sonic inspiration for Eureka the Butcher as being a yearning for something a little more postmodern than previous projects: “I wanted music that could be played on big speakers, like DJs do. A lot of it, from the production aspect, was inspired by Hip-Hop producers of the late 90’s and early 2000’s, like DJ Hightech and J Dilla and friends we’d made. like (DJ) Nobody and Low End Theory. My brother and I used to be really into Hip-Hop, but it had been a while since we’d listened to that kind of stuff.” The finished product essentially embodies traditional musicality and musicianship being handled by a dark, synthetic, post-pop master. It’s certainly fun, but also a bit haunting. It’s certainly danceable, but also a quite heady.
[youtube http://youtu.be/YK9q8-DNoKQ]
The biggest inspiration for the Music for Mothers was the passing of Marcel’s own multi-instrumental mother, who passed away last year, who encouraged her son, the percussionist, to learn piano so that he could perform live all by himself. And, to be honest, it’s the most impressive artistic ode to mothers since Almodovar’s. The album was conceived of during moments of downtime, while Marcel was on tour with The Mars Volta and Zechs Marquise, as a sort of therapy for dealing with his loss. The finished product more or less achieved his mother’s wish of being able to perform music all on his own, and he tells me what he’s most excited for in 2013 is getting to be able to play this music live. Although he’s not the sole contributor to the live experience: “My girlfriend [Sadah Luna] dances to the music, but it’s always evolving and we want to bring in visuals soon.” When I ask him what can be expected of the live experience, he tells me that he was going for something a bit more club-friendly than he had done previously, but that he had certainly not given up on his own instrumentation.
“It’s not quite just a DJ playing music. It’s all original. It’s all my sounds. I wrote it all. I’ll go piece-by-piece and play each instrument. A lot of people assume that I use samples when I play live, but it’s all me. It’s like remixing live.”
